The Descent into the Maelstrom (The Phantom of the Earth Book 4)

by Zen, Raeden

  “You’d best get to work then, young man.” Parthenia swatted the air with her forefingers, sending the knots and origami toward Pasha. He struggled but soon untied and retied the knots and unformed and reformed the origami. Then they moved on to palindromic prose until Oriana’s head ached. Afterward, the lady escorted them to the simulation room and fastened them into their harnesses …

  … The twins stood with Lady Parthenia on what looked like an infinite field beneath a colorful sunset sky.

  The trimmed grass tickled Oriana’s toes. She looked down at her sparring clothes, a tank top and shorts, and smiled. Martial arts. The lady had been training them in the style of House Summerset, a style, Oriana learned from Nathan Storm, renowned throughout the commonwealth.

  Parthenia lifted her hair into a ponytail, then held out her hands. Two diamond swords formed, and she tightened her fingers around the hilts. She stepped off her heels, moving her feet as if she strolled through a garden. She swung the two swords in rhythm.

  “The goal in the martial arts is the same as it is in the Harpoons, as it is in the commonwealth, as it is in life.”

  She twisted between the twins, swinging up and down, like a transhuman scissor.

  “You must seek total victory.”

  The lady never moved with just one foot. She stepped right and left, right and left, over and over.

  “Understand your opponent’s mind, feel her movements and strategy in the ZPF, and you will emerge victorious.”

  She swung the swords wide, spinning in circles. She stopped, holding the swords above her head. In a flash, she lowered the tips to within a centimeter of Oriana’s and Pasha’s faces. The twins didn’t move or blink.

  “Yes,” the lady said, “don’t frazzle.” She spun away from them. “Show your opponent weakness, and when she attacks, move swiftly and decisively.”

  Lady Parthenia handed the twins the swords and bowed to them. She stepped away.

  Oriana took her high stance, her sword hilt near her head. Pasha held his sword low and to the left. Oriana moved so that her back faced the sun. Pasha countered, moving to his right.

  “Very good,” Parthenia said. The sun disappeared beneath the horizon. Stars shone brightly. “Now, begin.”

  The twins moved left and right, right and left, striking, parrying, over and over, faster, faster.

  “Handle your swords the way you do your minds,” Parthenia yelled, “with tranquility and ease!”

  Oriana loosened her grip on her sword, moving step for step with her twin, mirroring his technique.

  “Know your opponents, learn their rhythms!”

  Oriana felt sweat drench her face and neck. Pasha spun to his left and pushed up against her.

  She escaped. He held his sword with both hands and swung for her face. Oriana parried the strike.

  “Always use one hand!”

  Pasha grasped the hilt with his left hand. Oriana stabbed toward his heart. He blocked.

  She recovered with another strike, swinging left to right, and right to left, again and again and again.

  “Don’t strike with your body and sword simultaneously!”

  Oriana blocked Pasha’s sideswipe and swung for his neck. Her brother ducked.

  She swung gracefully. He dodged, but she cut off a piece of his mohawk.

  “Lead with your body, then with your sword!” The lady skipped beside them.

  Pasha grunted and held his sword laterally to his left, then swung it for Oriana’s legs.

  Oriana jumped and roundhouse kicked him.

  He fell on his back and rolled to avoid her next strike. He regained his footing, swinging his sword widely.

  Oriana stepped forward and turned left, avoiding her brother’s offensive.

  “Attack and stick! Attack and stick!”

  Oriana pushed off the ground with her right foot and swung her sword high, left, harder, harder.

  She stepped back on Pasha’s next strike, blocked, then struck her sword to his, moving it up and down and around.

  Oriana feigned lethargy, and as he was about to separate and strike, she extended her right shoulder, slamming into his chest.

  He flew on the ground and rolled, breathing hard and searching for his sword.

  Oriana held the tips of both swords in front of Pasha’s nose. He stared at the blades cross-eyed, then up to her. Sweat dripped off their chins.

  “Give me my sword, O.” Pasha stood. Oriana didn’t listen to him. “Give it!”

  “No,” Lady Parthenia said.

  Pasha huffed. “Oriana cheated!”

  “Her movements are imprecise,” Parthenia said, and Oriana’s grin disappeared, “but she’s moving with tranquility and ease. She’s not pretending—”

  “Neither am I!” Pasha slammed his left foot down. “She sent false signals in the ZPF—”

  “Now I’ll hear no more about this.” Parthenia ended the lesson, and the twins again hung in the simulation room in their harnesses. “You each must study and practice, practice, practice until you’re so exhausted you can’t see your extended consciousnesses, then rest. We’ll begin your next lesson in one hour.” She hand-signaled to the bots and departed.

  When the twins touched the ground, Oriana turned to Pasha. “I told you you’d beg me one day.”

  He left the simulation room without saying a word.

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Nero Silvana

  City in the Vale

  Cineris, Underground Central

  2,500 meters deep

  “We shouldn’t have stopped in Halcyon Village,” Aera said softly.

  “Fair enough,” Nero said, “but you took down at least fifty Janzers in the Crypt. What could these do?” He did his best to keep his voice steady and sure, tucking his hatred for this place deep inside where he’d kept it since he learned, during early development in House Variscan, that this was the city where he had been abandoned.

  Their transport had been unexpectedly redirected at the Phanes Beltway to the City in the Vale, and the Janzers had halted all transports for search at Tachyon Station. The lines of Beimenians lengthened. Complaints and curses followed. Nero and Aera slipped through the crowd, out of the station, and onto pedestrian pathways decorated by fractal trees. Buildings rose around them, some made of stone, others of glass, carbyne, alloy, many half-constructed with cranes angled toward the Granville sky. Synthetic dark blue fireflies scattered about, visible in the soft sunlight of Cineris Territory. The atmosphere smelled of vanilla and burning minerals, making Nero want to puke.

  Prior to their departure from the Hollow, Aera had injected him with synisms that turned his eyes from greenish-blue to charcoal-gray, his skin from bronze to ivory, his hair from reddish-brown to light green. She also gave him a satchel with eyedroppers labeled VITAMIN T, which, she assured him, would shield his genetic composition from the tenehounds. The hounds slithered through the crowd now and poked their alloy noses here and there, searching for traitors, possibly them. Nero quickened his step.

  Every minute of this delay drew Verena closer to a fate like Brody’s. Nero didn’t want to believe what he’d witnessed of his captain’s hearing. A part of him hoped Jeremiah had deceived him through the ZPF, but this idea was shattered when he visited House Summerset. It seemed his options were few, his friends fewer.

  Nero looked down at Aera. He didn’t trust her, but her skills were undeniable, and he required them to rescue Verena, then Brody. It was a minor miracle he’d convinced Jeremiah to let him try, even more surprising when Aera offered to help. The BP didn’t run like the commonwealth, that was for sure. Decision-making was sloppy, erratic, anarchistic. Nero rather liked it, despite himself.

  “Come,” he said, “to the hills and the mount.”

  Aera rushed ahead of him and disappeared in the fog along the trail outside the city. The sky here looked overcast. When Nero neared her, she said, “If you can’t beat me up this sorry excuse for a mountainside, how do you expect to conquer me in battle?” Her voi
ce carried along the ridge.

  Nero stomped the ashen trail that led to Mount Cineris, a mountain in name only, for its peak wouldn’t crest a hill upon the surface of the Earth. He slowed and grazed his hand over the nearby grass, pale and tall and flowered, broken by leafless trees. His hooded lab coat, infused with chameleon synisms, adjusted to the surroundings.

  “This is where I was born,” Nero said. Something about Aera’s presence made him comfortable speaking about Cineris and his past. He’d heard so much about the First Aera; among the falsities of her legend, there was truth in her strength and wisdom, a presence unlike any Nero had experienced in his life. “This is where I should be …”

  “This is an ashen dump,” Aera said. She unsheathed her shuriken and spun it telekinetically. The blades swatted the tops of the white grass. “No place for a striker.” She raised her hand and glided the weapon into the holster on her belt. “No place for an aera.”

  Nero nodded. He ran to the edge of the plateau, scanning the ridge and the City in the Vale, three kilometers distant, with his enhanced vision. The hounds and Janzers moved swiftly through the crowd. Aera joined him. He offered her a canteen, but she declined. The water felt cold in his throat. He poured some over his head, then wiped his face and detached a tiger’s-eye pipe from his utility belt.

  “My parents are down there,” Nero pointed his pipe to the grandest structure in the center of the city, “in that building.” He paused and turned to the flowered grass. “The Paradox Building.” He pulled blue velvet leaves from a satchel. “They abandoned me after my birth. I’ve never even met them …”

  Aera eyed the leaves with disdain.

  Nero lit the pipe, puffed blissfully, and blew out hoops. A blue morpho butterfly flew through them. “For the first two decades after Jeremiah recruited our team, Brody and I would race up this mount every year, and we’d light pipes just like this one.”

  The image was so clear to Nero. They’d rushed up the trail in military fatigues and reminisced about missions to the surface, to distant planets. They’d pondered new conversions, the cure for Reassortment, the awakenings of the scientists frozen in space-time—and once Brody had asked why he would come back here. “I want to meet Svana and Orsino,” Nero told him. “I want to see what they look like, ask them why they left me, find out why they won’t speak to me.” Nero’s voice had turned spiteful. “I’d want them to understand what it feels like to be abandoned.” Brody had apologized for broaching the subject and replied: “I know what you’re feeling, and I know there’s nothing I can say to make you feel better.”

  Brody’s likeness disappeared from Nero’s sight, replaced by Aera. “All the time,” Nero said to her, “I’d tell him, ‘Captain, we’re so close, the solution to Reassortment is near.’” He blew out a stream of smoke and smiled wistfully. “We were as far as Vigna, and I can’t help but believe what happened was somehow his punishment for our failure—”

  “You keep thinking and talking about him, and not even our recallers will block Marstone from finding us.”

  “I don’t give a darn about Marstone.” He swigged his canteen. “If I’d stayed at the Bicentennial—”

  “You couldn’t have helped him, and if you were there—”

  “I would’ve killed Antosha. I would have ended it.”

  Aera moved her hands through the powder on the ground, fine crystals layered throughout Cineris Territory’s bedrock, loosened during the terraforming, making it appear as if the place was covered with ash. “No,” she inclined her head, “he would’ve taken you out and you’d be sitting on one of Farino’s prison islands next to your captain.” She cradled a handful of dust and let it blow with the breeze over the mount. She patted her hands, and the specks spilled over the blossom-dotted white grass.

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Things are as they are. I’ll do what I must. And I need your help.”

  She laughed. “The prison? Striker, not with a hundred of your kind could you do what you’re thinking.”

  “Then I’ll die trying.”

  “And what would that accomplish? There’re tens of thousands of Janzers in Farino Prison. You wouldn’t survive an hour with any synsuit technology that now exists.”

  “I don’t need a synsuit.”

  Aera inspected the blades of her shuriken. “So, striker, tell me what your parents do.” She pointed her weapon toward the Paradox Building.

  “You’re deflecting—”

  “You misunderstand me.” She flicked her wrist, and the shuriken flew far across the clearing to the center of a white tree trunk. “My mind is clear. Yours is not. Something’s holding you back.”

  Nero relented. “They were initially part of the geothermal energy team Masimovian sent here.”

  Aera raised her hand, pulled the shuriken back to her grip, and holstered it. “So they’re the ones who nearly destroyed the commonwealth.”

  “Not exactly,” Nero said with a hint of a smile. “Lord Rueben Variscan told me they sought to harness a vast reservoir of geothermal energy deep beneath the bedrock in the inaccessible region beside Cineris. They used mineral crushers. During the journey and as the temps and pressure rose, they realized they’d have to dig much, much farther to reach the energy source. They worried about structural integrity. So instead the chancellor ordered the Paradox Building be converted into a Granville sky panel factory.”

  Nero sucked on his pipe, and with Aera, looked ponderingly at the building. Slate-gray siding lined the vertical portion. Streaks of neon silver at the corners flowed down to the horizontal portion on the ground, where Janzers and scientists intermingled. Nero followed the building up, diagonal, and down, and up. The horizontal, vertical, and diagonal parts of the building appeared connected, even as he knew they couldn’t be.

  “That building holds the engineers who manipulate the commonwealth’s sky, cirrus clouds in Cineris today, sunshine in Vivo tomorrow. They maintain the human circadian rhythm.”

  “Here I always assumed the Granville sky was designed to hide the reality of our tomb.”

  “That too.”

  Aera meandered into the tall grass and lowered the hood of her lab coat from her head. Nero wiped the sweat from his brow and envisioned his parents, top 10 percent Harpoon performers, in their lab coats as they stirred from workstation to workstation and composed the Granville sky illusion. He closed his eyes and let the picture settle in his mind. Why did they lose hope? Why did they give him up? And why did they never answer his calls? One day, he would meet them and ask them this and more.

  A blue morpho butterfly landed on the tip of his pipe. Nero grinned and exhaled. It took off again.

  “She doesn’t like the smoke either,” Aera said.

  “She doesn’t know what she’s missing.” Nero stowed his pipe.

  Aera drew her diamond sword.

  “I don’t think we have time for that,” Nero said. “Where the tenehounds go, Lady Isabelle often follows.”

  “Good. Let her come.”

  Nero drew his sword, and Cineris’s soft blue-gray sun reflected off its surface. “Mighty Aera,” he said and met her sword with his. Sparks flew, like lightning. “If not her, what could frighten you?”

  She swung and spun. Nero blocked her salvos. She pushed under his wrist so fast he couldn’t react and untangled his sword from his fingers. She held both over Nero’s neck like shears.

  “The thought of living out the rest of my days in the grip of a system that created me but never gave me a chance to live,” she handed Nero his sword and pointed hers east, toward Beimeni City, “that favors the privileged and forgets the past and forces those of us who have the ability to change the world into a life of servitude, consumed by the fear of mortality.”

  She held her sword perpendicular over her head. Nero charged. She swung twice, flipped sideways around him, and rapped him across his back with the bottom of her boot. He fell to the groun
d, surrounded by a plume of white smoke.

  “You carry yourself as if your contemporary striker training should intimidate me,” Aera said, “but until you realize how your adherence to style hinders your element of surprise, you will never defeat me.”

  “And you’re a hypocrite,” Nero said.

  “I’m a survivalist.”

  “You use athanasia!”

  He charged her and she stepped back, left, back, right, forward. Their swords sparked. Then she spun under him and, with her left leg wrapped around him, spun him to the ground. She flipped though the air, Nero in her leg grip, landed on her hands, and knelt. Even as he flew, Nero marveled at her defiance of gravity.

  He crashed into a tree. A plume of dust shivered from it. The grass fluttered as his sword swooped away, end over end.

  “You keep this up,” Nero coughed, “and I might not make it to Palaestra—”

  “They’re dispersing.”

  He looked down at his belt. Of course, he thought. She had shattered his pipe. He threw the pieces in the grass. Down in the vale, where the Janzer divisions had gathered, the Cinerisian workers flowed into transports.

  Aera held the blade of his sword, its handle toward him. “Time to go.”

  ZPF Impulse Wave: Oriana Barão

  Candidate Beach

  Harpoon VR

  Oriana stood with Pasha barefoot on warm white sand.

  Waves tumbled along a shoreline. In the distance, swirls of galaxies and nebulae dangled amid the stars. A bright blue moon shone nearby. Oriana breathed the smells of seaweed and burning torches, which hung from palm trees. Candidates in illuminated bathing suits strolled along the dunes.

  “For certain, the lady and the lord didn’t pick that outfit,” Pasha said.

  Oriana looked down at her silk gown with spaghetti straps, which barely covered her two-piece bathing suit. “Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s fine, don’t be so pissy.”

  Pasha wore a tank top and light blue trunks. His hair was combed upward and ridged atop his head like a striker’s. Oriana scoffed. “Like you weren’t thinking of Desaray when you chose your hairstyle.”